Sharon Olds

Poet

• Born: November 19, 1942
• Place of Birth: San Francisco, California

Biography

Sharon Olds has described her attendance at an anti-Vietnam War poetry reading in 1974 as an experience that opened her eyes to the possibilities of poetry. As she listened to writers like Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich, she became aware of poets writing about their lives' intimate materials. Olds had been writing all her life, but that experience led her to a new view of poetry that evidently informed her subsequent work.

Olds was born Sharon Stuart Cobb in San Francisco on November 19, 1942. She was raised in nearby Berkeley in what she later described as a strict, “hellfire Calvinist” household. Her family was a troubled one, and her father’s alcoholism eventually led to her parents’ divorce.

At age fifteen, Olds was sent to the Dana Hall School, a boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she came to love eastern landscapes and seasons. During this time, she also began to read great quantities of poetry. Olds received a BA in languages from Stanford University in 1964 before returning to the East Coast to pursue graduate studies. She earned her PhD in American literature from Columbia University in 1972.

Olds’s first book of poetry, Satan Says (1980), startled critics with its blunt sexual language, and some readers suggested that Olds was merely attempting to shock the public. Since then, however, sexual awareness has been an ongoing theme in Olds’s work. She has frequently described herself as a literalist, and part of her vision concerns the unity of the physical world with the world of spirit and insight often associated with the poet. Her second book, The Dead and the Living (1984), won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award and was the Academy of American Poets Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983.

The Gold Cell, Olds’s third collection, was published in 1987. Its contents are typical of Olds’s subjects, including poems inspired by newspaper accounts of rape and abandoned babies; poems about her family (in one, she looks at a youthful picture of her parents during their courtship and wishes she could warn them against the marriage that will cause them so much pain), including her father and her daughters; and poems about her own body. In an interview for Poets & Writers magazine, Olds referred to a “spectrum of loyalty and betrayal,” associating loyalty with the “absolute silence” of privacy and betrayal with “song, and out at the far end perhaps very little consideration for other people's privacy.” Poets, she said, find their place on the spectrum by trial and error.

During the early 1980s, Olds was instrumental in founding the Golden Writers workshop for patients at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Initially, it was supposed to be an eight-week workshop modeled on similar programs in other hospitals. However, its great popularity led New York University’s creative writing program, where Olds was teaching at the time, to begin supplying the workshop with teachers, leaders, and people to transcribe the writers’ work. The writers themselves are adults with disabilities, some severe enough that they can neither move nor speak without technological or human assistance. Olds has called them people of “unimaginable spiritual power” and says every hospital, prison, school, building, and store should have a poet. Although Goldwater Memorial Hospital closed in 2013, the Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshop continues to be held weekly, with occasional readings at NYU.

Olds’s 1992 collection, The Father, received more critical attention than her previous books. It tells in painful detail the story of Olds’s father’s death from cancer and of the reconciliation that he and his daughter finally managed between them. Some of the book’s reviewers felt that in this difficult series of poems, Olds had gone too far toward betrayal on the spectrum of intimacy. Others saw the poems as a narrative of redemption in which the daughter who once wrote angrily about the inadequacy of a gift her father sent her after her parent’s divorce—a dress, which she had loved until her mother told her that her father had merely sent the money and instructions for her to choose the gift—now could find a way to reconcile with the man who had caused her so much pain in her life.

The poems in The Father follow the events of Olds’s father’s illness chronologically, tracing in detail the care she gives him on her visits, recalling their angry past, and describing parts of her father’s body—his eyes, the tumor, and even his penis—with suffering care. In the last poems in the collection, the reader finds Olds’s consolations in her growing identification with her father as she recognizes how similar they are in looks and how they can, at last, share some mutual understanding. Gradually, she senses that she and her father have fallen into a sort of atonement, a feeling that becomes even more acute after her father’s death. The last poems describe an awareness that love must not deny past betrayals and abuses that still cause pain. Olds says everyone is filled with those sad things, and they cannot be ignored, but they need not cancel the reality of love. The Father testifies to that love while at the same time honoring the pain.

The Unswept Room (2002) also received a very positive critical reception, including a nomination for the 2002 National Book Award for Poetry. The collection continues Olds’s themes of sensuality, sexuality, the body and life, and family. However, this volume finds Olds more at peace and even happy. She never loses her courage in writing about facing life openly, aggressively, and honestly.

Olds followed this work with Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002 (2004) and One Secret Thing (2008). In 2012, she published Stag’s Leap, a collection of poems written in the aftermath of her husband of thirty-two years and the father of her two children leaving her for another woman. Although her marriage ended in 1997, Olds waited to publish the poems for her children’s sake. Stag’s Leap was met with wide critical acclaim and earned Olds the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Book Society, which Eliot cofounded in 1953. She was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her work.

Olds was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2015. The following year, she published a collection of poems, simply titled Odes, that focus on physical, often sexual topics. She remained true to her thematic approach from previous works while adopting the ode format. Also that year, she was presented with the Academy of American Poets's Wallace Stevens Award. The next year, she published the poetry collection Odes (2016).

In 2019, Olds published Arias, a collection of poems covering political, personal, and racial topics. The following year, she was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize for Arias. In 2022, she published Balladz, which earned the Frost Medal, the Joan Margarit International Poetry Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Author Works

Poetry:

Satan Says, 1980

The Dead and the Living, 1984

The Gold Cell, 1987

The Sign of Saturn: Poems, 1980-1987, 1991

The Father, 1992

The Wellspring, 1995

Blood, Tin, Straw, 1999

The Unswept Room, 2002

Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002, 2004

One Secret Thing, 2008

Stag's Leap, 2012

Odes, 2016

Penguin Modern Poets 3: Your Family, Your Body, 2017

Arias, 2019

Balladz, 2022

Bibliography

Baker, David. Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry. U of Arkansas P, 2000.

Durrant, Sabine. “Sharon Olds: Confessions of a Divorce.” Guardian, 26 Jan. 2013, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/26/sharon-olds-american-poet-divorce. Accessed 20 July 2024.

“Fine Print: Poet Sharon Olds Chronicles the End of Her Marriage in a New Collection.” Vogue, Condé Nast, 22 Aug. 2012, www.vogue.com/article/fine-print-poet-sharon-olds-chronicles-the-end-of-her-marriage-in-a-new-collection. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Jasim, Jinan Hameed. "Confession and the Feminine Self: A Comparative Study in Selected Poems of Wafa'a Abdul Razzaq and Sharon Olds." Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities, vol. 28, no. 6, 2021, pp. 20-49. dx.doi.org/10.25130/jtuh.28.2021.02.

Matson, Suzanne. “Talking to Our Father: The Political and Mythical Appropriations of Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds.” American Poetry Review, vol. 18, no. 6, 1989, pp. 35–41.

Olds, Sharon. Interview with Laurel Blossom. Poets & Writers, Sept.–Oct. 1993, pp. 30–32.

Ostriker, Alicia. “American Poetry, Now Shaped by Women.” New York Times Book Review, 9 Mar. 1986, p. 1.

Øyehaug, Gunnhild. "Apparently Personal: On Sharon Olds." The Paris Review, 1 Sept. 2023, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/09/01/apparently-personal-on-sharon-olds. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Scheponik, Peter C. “Olds’s ‘My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead.’” Explicator, vol. 57, no. 1, 1998, pp. 59–62. Academic Search Complete.

"Sharon Olds." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sharon-olds. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Sutton, Brian. “Olds’s ‘Sex without Love.’” Explicator, vol. 55, no. 3, 1997, pp. 177–80. Academic Search Complete.